


The Sun, the Moon and Starsky

by Dawnwind



Category: Starsky and Hutch - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-20
Updated: 2011-05-20
Packaged: 2017-10-19 15:39:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/202454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dawnwind/pseuds/Dawnwind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A rainy stakeout and a little talk about the weather.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sun, the Moon and Starsky

Rain played a staccato melody on the hood of the car, never quite with enough of a regular tempo for Hutch to hum to. He'd get a tune in his head and then the wind would shift, alternating the rhythm of the raindrops on the metal. For a while, the refrain _Raindrops keep Falling on my Head_ circled his brain and then it switched to the current radio hit _It's Raining Again_ by Supertramp. That one was particularly annoying because he'd only heard the song a couple of times, so the chorus repeated endlessly in his head until he was sure he was going to go crazy. He tried to substitute something less saccharine only to have _I Love to Walk in the Rain_ , a damned Shirley Temple song sneak in.

The last thing he wanted to do was walk in the rain. It had now rained for three days straight, the exact same length of time that he and Starsky had been staked out in front of Maury 'Libra' Larson's place of business. Maury had not been near the warehouse in three days and both Starsky and Hutch were just about at the limit of their patience. There was only so long two people could sit in a car, doing nothing for eight hours a day. Even Starsky seemed to have lost his appetite for snack foods from the local Seven/Eleven—and peeing into an old soda bottle had completely lost its appeal.

"Hutch?" Starsky shifted in his seat, rousing from the doze he'd been in for the last hour. "When you lived in Duluth, did you believe that it was always sunny in California? Always hot?'

" _It never rains in California…da-duh…._ " Hutch tried to recall the words but at least the song pushed Shirley's ditty out of his brain.

" _But girl don't they warn you, it pours, man it pours._ " Starsky swayed along with the tune. "Yeah, see? It's in all the songs." He raised his fist to the gray, murky heavens. "You hear that? Not supposed to be raining!"

"Van and I moved here in June." Hutch raised the binoculars to focus on a car passing by. The silver Toyota blended in with the low lying clouds, and didn't slow as it passed Larsen's building. "Day after finals at U. of Minn. We only brought a single suitcase each, excited to get out of the damned rain there, and into the heat." He lowered the binoculars, glancing over at Starsky with a rueful grin. "We never had a honeymoon so we were going to spend a couple of days in San Francisco first. Stepped off the plane in shorts and cotton shirts."

Starsky laughed, nodding. "I've been to San Francisco in the summer. Freezes your ass off."

"You can say that twice." Hutch mock shivered. "It was less than sixty degrees with the kind of fog that I'd thought only occurs in Sherlock Holmes novels."

"Pea soup fog for dinner, Watson?" Starsky affected a British accent. "You go down to Fisherman's wharf there, on the bay?"

"Yeah, and loaded up on sweatshirts! Van was pissed. And you can't even have crab in June. Her favorite."

"Crab kinda suits her."

"We still had this idea that Southern California would be paradise. Hot, palm trees, beaches for ever."

"June gloom." Starsky picked a couple Oreos out of the package and stuffed two in his mouth. "The weather pattern no one around here likes to talk about."

"We rented this little place in Venice, right on the water. Cold in the morning, cold in the evening when the wind picked up and brought back the fog." Hutch watched another car cruise past as if looking for a parking place, but it didn't stop either. "Still, it was California—and when the sun came out, it was dazzling."

Starsky grinned, and for a moment, Hutch remembered that first sunny day in Venice. Just like Starsky's smile, full of promise and warmth, something to drive the chill right out of his bones.

"My ma told me I'd meet a movie star the first day I arrived." Starsky peered through the fogged up window and finally used the sleeve of his sweatshirt to clear a space. "My best friend Danny O'Malley told me I'd be killed by an earthquake after the first week. I figured I'd see Bogey and die at the age of thirteen, having fulfilled every kid's dream.'

"Instead?"

"I came out here on the train and I ate all four peanut butter and jelly sandwiches my ma gave me on the first day, so I was starving to death when I finally arrived. Aunt Rose took me to a kosher deli and it was raining. Kinda like this." Starsky kicked his Adidas against the floorboards of the car and ate another Oreo. "Didn't seem like I'd left New York. I thought Bay City would be different."

"Did you ever see a movie star?"

"Not one." Starsky frowned and raised his finger. "I take that back. Did see one. Saw Lassie once at the mall."

"I always liked Lassie movies."

"You would. I wanted Bogart or Wayne, somebody cool." He straightened at the same time as Hutch did, tracking a green Chevy that paused in front of Larson's place, but the driver consulted a map and took off, tires splashing through a puddle. The backwash sprayed water across Hutch's LTD.

Flicking on the windshield wiper, Hutch watched them flip back and forth, the tune to _Raindrops keep Falling on my Head_ back in his head again. He resisted the urge to hum along. "Van complained that first year, about everything. At first she liked the sun, but then, it didn't snow in the winter, so I took her to the mountains. She doesn't ski, so she was too cold. Couldn't please her."

"Hutch, no matter what you did, you never would have. That's her nature." Starsky stretched one hand across the top of the bench seat, the tips of his fingers brushing Hutch's sleeve.

"Yeah." He closed his eyes, recalling the fights, the make-up sex and the subsequent fights. Nothing ever satisfied Van, until everything he did made her angry. Very conscious of Starsky's fingers against his arm, Hutch settled back, hunching his shoulders and twisting to find the right position for his back. "You know what surprised me most about California?"

"That it never rains in the summer? I actually used to like those summer thunder storms in New York."

"Well, yeah, but that's not what I was thinking of. It's the seasons. I'd heard there were none— that it was one long, hot day at the beach from January to December."

"California's got some good P.R." Starsky launched into an Ethel Merman-esque version of _California, Here I Come_ until Hutch clapped a hand over his mouth. Starsky licked his palm, chuckling. "That whole no seasons thing is such a crock."

"It may not be the seasons I grew up with," Hutch wiped his wet hand on Starsky's jean clad thigh. "But there sure are seasons."

"The rainy season!" Starsky threw out his hands like a circus barker. "Which comes after Fire season. We get fire season because there's no rain in the summer so the hills are brown as dirt—"

"That's golden, according to the travel brochures." Hutch grabbed the very last Oreo for himself, surprised at how much fun he was having. "Don't forget the tule fog."

"Of course, then, since it rains in the winter, it's green everywhere and there's tulips and daffodils in February—"

"That's because it's unseasonably hot on Valentine's day half the time."

"And then there's the damned Santa Ana winds that drive the people in the valley to murder." Starsky threw back his head with a spooky laugh that ended on a higher pitched giggle. Hutch laughed just because Starsky was. "When did you know that you'd never go back, Hutch?"

"The first winter that I didn't have to shovel snow every morning. How about you?"

"The day I came back from the 'Nam." Starsky looked down suddenly, playing with the crinkly paper of the cookie wrapper. Waiting for the rest of the confession, Hutch listened to the sound of truck tires sloshing along the wet street. "Fort Ord's up the coast, near Monterey. It's kinda flat, with scrub oak and these twisted cypress trees from the wind pounding them into weird shapes. Nothing like Bay City or New York. The sun was settin' across the ocean like a golden stripe from California all the way to Hawaii, and I was so damned glad to be home." Starsky's voice broke on the last word and he cleared his throat. "I know, real dumb."

Hutch said nothing. He shrugged his shoulder as if he still couldn't get comfortable in the confines of the driver's seat and reached his right arm across the back of the seat so that his hand draped over Starsky's.

Starsky clasped Hutch's fingers hard, just once.

"You remember when we were in the Academy? Must have rained every day we ran the obstacle course." Hutch watched Starsky's profile, saw him shake off old emotions.

"I had mud in my shorts. So much for sunny California." Starsky shivered. He took the binoculars, training them on the warehouse. "And naturally, it was beach weather the days we had tests."

"Van was in the process of leaving me, and you came over the night we graduated." That was fifteen years ago and Hutch could still feel the knot of confusion and pain that welled up inside him when ever he thought of Van's acrimonious last days as his wife.

"Beer and pizza."

"And some Vic Rankin on the record player." Hutch rubbed a small circle in the fogged windshield. The rain had all but stopped, droplets from some branches hanging over the car dripping in the annoying rhythm of a leaky faucet. "The moon came out and even though it was December and only about forty degrees, we went out on the roof."

"Toasted the stars, remember?" Starsky opened his window to let in some post-rain fresh air and raised an imaginary beer to the cloudy skies. "You told me the names of the constellations."

"You were drunk."

"So were you." Starsky turned to look at him, his blue eyes so bright that they drove away the gloom and made the sun come out. "Think that was the reason you kissed me?"

"No." Hutch would have liked to kiss him right then but they were on stakeout. "That was the day I knew I was home."

The End.


End file.
